# Multiple input files **URL:** https://forum.qiime2.org/t/multiple-input-files/1992 **Category:** Developer Discussion **Tags:** plugin-development **Created:** [November 27, 2017, 10:31pm UTC](https://forum.qiime2.org/t/multiple-input-files/1992 "2017-11-27T22:31:24Z") **Posts on this page:** 1 **Showing post:** 7
### Author: ![Stefan](https://forum.qiime2.org/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/bbce88/32.png) [@Stefan](https://forum.qiime2.org/u/Stefan) #### Post date: [November 28, 2017, 6:05pm UTC](https://forum.qiime2.org/t/multiple-input-files/1992/7 "2017-11-28T18:05:25Z")
What is already happening is that users independently run fragment insertion for several microbiome studies. If they then decide to do a meta-analysis it is not necessary to run fragment insertion on a merged biom table. Instead, to save some compute, the user could collect all his/her placement files and merge them into one, from which one unified insertion tree can be computed - as long as all individual runs used the same reference tree. Another use case is to chunk your input to distribute it across a grid, but that is more of an edge case. (Since it is cluster specific and trivial, I don't want to add explicit support with the plugin to chunk input and execute them) In the end, I don't have control over the number or names of the placement files a user wants to merge. --- _[View the full topic](https://forum.qiime2.org/t/multiple-input-files/1992)._